Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [39]
The early wars didn’t cost us a lot of lives, so it seemed everything would remain normal. But those wars only gave us a few more years of oil.
A: I heard that when you were born there was so much oil that you switched to making everything out of it. And that most of these things would be used once and thrown away. A couple of years ago Mom and Dad got scavenger permits for the dump. Mom said they struck it rich. They found a bunch of plastic bags that hadn’t decomposed one bit. And inside them were lots of things made of plastic. You guys sure were smart to preserve all that stuff so neatly in those bags.
M: Well, thank you, but it was just a lucky accident. You’re right that we made everything from oil by turning it into plastic. Furniture upholstery, grocery bags, toys, bottles, clothes, medicines, even baby diapers were made from oil. The list of what was made with oil and by-products of oil was endless: aspirin, cameras, golf balls, car batteries, carpet, fertilizers, eyeglasses, shampoo, glue, computers, cosmetics, detergents, telephones, food preservatives, footballs, insecticides, luggage, nail polish, toilet seats, panty hose, toothpaste, pillows, soft contact lenses, tires, pens, CDs, sneakers—you name it, and it came in some way from oil. Man, we were hooked on the stuff. We would take a drink from a plastic bottle and throw it away. We might burn a gallon of oil to drive to a store for a gallon of milk (which came in a plastic bottle, too). Every Christmas your grandmother would get presents mostly made of plastic under a plastic Christmas tree (but made to look real). And yes, it’s true we even wrapped our garbage in plastic and tossed it out.
A: Where did people come up with the idea for BURNING oil? Why would you burn something you have only a little bit of? Did people burn diamonds back then, too?
M: No, people didn’t burn diamonds. Diamonds were considered precious. Oil was considered precious, too, but no one cared. We just turned it into gasoline, lit a spark plug and burned the damned stuff any chance we could!
A: What was it like when you couldn’t breathe because of the dirty air caused by burning what you called gasoline? Didn’t that make you realize that anything that came from oil wasn’t supposed to be burned? Maybe that smell was nature’s way of trying to tell you, “Don’t burn me!”
M: Ooh, ooh, that smell. It was nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong. What were we thinking? What were we singing?
A: Huh?
M: Never mind.
A: But it was poisoning you. And you didn’t have breathing stations like we do now, so what did you do?
M: People would just have to suck it up and breathe it in. This caused millions of people to suffer and die. No one wanted to say it was air pollution from burning fossil fuels that was making it hard to breathe, so doctors said we had asthma or allergies. While you think of a ride in an automobile as something you do at a museum, in those days most people were “commuting” twenty, thirty, even forty miles to work and they hated the hours they spent trapped in their cars. It put them in really bad moods.
A: So you burned up all the precious oil while hating yourselves. Weird.
M: Hey, I didn’t say we hated ourselves. We hated the commute, but lots of people thought it was worth it because they didn’t want to live in cities that had lots of different people living in them.
A: What I don’t get is if you were having all this fun, driving around and stuff, using up all our oil, why didn’t you plan to switch over to another fuel before you ran out so you could keep having fun?
M: The American people were the kind of people who would get stuck on doing things one way and never want to change.
A: What’s American?
M: Let’s not get into that.
A: My sixth-grade teacher told us one of your leaders believed “hydrogen fuel cells” would replace gasoline cars, but they didn’t. That was crazy! Today every kid knows that hydrogen is hard to get. Sure it’s in H2O, but it takes a lot of energy to break